September 25, 2015

By "personal" I mean that the problem is not that House Members and Senators are less than perfectly competent, intelligent principled, or honest or anything like that. To a greater lesser extent, depending on the person, they are all less than perfect. Always have been; always will be. That's the only kind of Congress it is possible to have, given the unavoidable necessity of selecting members from among our fellow human beings. (Ditto for the White House and Supreme Court.) Our Founders understood this and set up the House and Senate to function in ways designed to aggregate members' wisdom and reduce their room for mischief.

September 23, 2015

. . . great, president. He was good on policy and, in his state, on politics. He had the smarts and the courage to offer hope that he could repair some of the destruction of progressives' fundamental transformation. Now, alas, he has pulled out of the race. His political support faded and, with it, his campaign money. I send a small check every month and would have continued to do so. Now, though, it is time to look for a new candidate. That's the system. Long live the system.

Why did his campaign implode? The best analysis I have seen comes from . . .

THERE ARE STILL intelligent, well-informed, and, most importantly, honest left intellectuals. Not many, but some. Possibly the best is Fred Hiatt, editorial-page editor of The Washington Post. His specialty is foreign affairs, on which he is a Democrat internationalist, a once-robust tribe, now small and scattered, now largely ignored by those in power. He is also a sober man. He chooses his words carefully. On most issues, he is sympathetic to the president and to Democrats. So when Fred Hiatt says that in Syria and Iraq, Mr. Obama has "presided over a humanitarian and cultural disaster of epochal proportions," he deserves special attention.

He said this in the first sentence of "Obama Syria Achievement," washingtonpost.com, September 6, 2015, set out (with Unca D's commentary) below. Worse than the epochal disaster, he says, is that the president has anesthetized the American people. We are no longer appalled by appalling things, and Mr. Obama is responsible for this.